S.A. NAT., VOL. XV. 
June 12th, 1934. 
Botanists and their Work. 
93. 
BOTANISTS AND THEIR WORK. 
By J. M. Black, a.l.s.. President of the Royal Society of 
South Australia. 
I am to speak tonight on “Botanists and their Work”, but 
naturally I can only refer to a few of them—a few who may 
perhaps have some special interest for you—because the number 
of botanists in the world to-day is prodigious. To assure \our¬ 
selves of this fact you need merely glance at the “Botanists’ 
Address Book”, prepared under the auspices of the Cambridge 
Botanical Congress and published quite recently. If you should 
be sufficiently interested to turn over the pages of that book, one 
fact may strike you as peculiar. There are more pages devoted 
to botanists and botanical institutions in Soviet Russia than in 
the United States of America. And when vou remember that in 
the one State of California there are three great universities, 
each with its botanical department, you will realise the great¬ 
ness of the pretensions raised in the Address Book on the strength 
of statistics supplied by the Soviet Government. According to 
the figures supplied, this country of Russia, depicted in such de¬ 
plorable terms by every independent investigator from W estern 
Europe, simply swarms with universities, phytologists (■!' every 
description, botanical gardens and experimental stations of all 
kinds. I will only say that it is curious, if not significant, that 
at the International Botanical Congress held at Cambridge in 
1930, there was not a single representative of these allegedly num¬ 
erous and enthusiastic Russian botanists, although every ether 
country in the world was well represented. 
The earliest botanists were the herbalists who gathered 
plants used in medicine. Such research must have begun when 
humanity was still in a savage state. We know how our own 
aborigines, always hungry, devour roots, juicy fruits, crush <eed$ 
for food and chew leaves of certain species of Xicotiana and Du- 
boisia as narcotics. \\ hile thus engaged they would find, or 
imagine they found, that some plants would cure diseases and 
that with others an enemy could be quickly and surreptitiously 
put out of the way. Think of the enthusiasm aroused in that 
South American tribe, when it was discovered that a resinous 
substance called curare, rubbed on the point of an arrow, would 
cause almost instant death. How superior to the old style of 
dipping the arrow-head in some decayed carcase and then trust¬ 
ing that the recipient would die slowly of blood-poisoning. One 
can imagine the king and council of that tribe greeting the dis¬ 
coverer of curare with the same enthusiasm as European military 
men displayed towards the genius who invented the explosive 
